Advanced Competitive Strategy will introduce new topics and modules with even more real world examples and opportunities for student interaction than in the previous course Competitive Strategy (https://www.coursera.org/learn/competitivestrategy).
In Advanced Competitive Strategy, we will look at how companies can build up and maintain their customer base by increasing switching costs and facilitating strategic customer lock-ins. We will find out how firms can increase their profits by pursuing suitable price discrimination and product differentiation strategies.
We will look at examples of what is acceptable behavior under the premises of EU competition and US antitrust policies and discover exciting ways of how companies can increase their returns by strategically making use of network effects and economies of size. We will further intensify our newly acquired knowledge about network effects and discuss strategies that are explicitly tailored to network markets.
We will analyze the workings of mergers and acquisitions and, moreover, support you in considering alternative strategies that can help companies grow organically.

From the lesson

Keep Your Business Clean

In this module we will demonstrate that if you want to operate a business you have to keep in mind that there are some powerful external entities, so-called competition authorities, that highly value and safeguard competition. While this supports and opens up opportunities for your business if it is new or relatively small and would otherwise simply be crushed by larger incumbent firms – it can also put you in danger if you have already achieved a certain size, have acquired more market power are already in a rather powerful position.